Starting a small business. · Apex Inner Game

Starting a small business.

This post stemmed from a conversation that

started, wanting some insights into small business and getting started. He is looking at getting into physical therapy, and he works in sales at Daniel Defense right now.

A good book to look at for anyone moving from working corporate to starting a business is The E-myth revisited by Michael Gerber. I'll sum up some ideas and points right here for you.

The E myth is the idea that small businesses are started by true-blue entrepreneurs. The truth is, most business are started by people who were initially working for others (e.g. carpenters, designers). They are good at what they do, decide to go into business, and make the fatal assumption that their credentials or specialized skills will allow them to be successful.

Business isn't just your technical skills or your product. It's branding and marketing, and administrative management as well.

Someone usually starts a business with a strong product or service and abilities there, but they fail in the branding and marketing side or admin side. There is another angle I see a lot in the digital world, and especially people in the space that I am (men's help and dating/relationships). They have a weak product, and they think that their digital marketing and branding skills will allow them to bank money. That bubble has already burst with a market of crappy products for "mens help" now circulating online.

Reality is you have to develop (and later hire) skills in all 3 areas:

Entrepreneurship

Management

Technician

Entrepreneurship "drives" the business. It focuses on how to market and brand, and how to look towards the future. It focuses on how to scale, which is the survival of any business growth.

Management is the administrative side, and is essential to scaling. This is systems focused. This focuses on the structure, fulfillment, and all the inner workings of the business. This is an area that many people with strong technical or entrepreneurial skills often fail, but if you fail here you can't scale or grow the business, and clients won't be happy.

Technician is the actual product you deliver. If a person owns a bakery, it's baking the cookies and the recipe. A physical therapist is his skills in physical therapy. And so on. You can be a very skilled technician and get buried by not being good at business management or growth.

If you don't nurture all 3, your business will likely fail.

There are 7 steps so that you can develop your business properly, so that you can have longevity and sustainable growth.

Determine your vision, or primary aim for your business

Start with an end state in mind. State your Strategic Objective; how how your business will look like when it’s “done”, and how it will help you to achieve your vision and what you want in life.
Develop your Organizational Strategy, so you can start testing, documenting and building roles today, toward your ideal future organization
Establish your Management Strategy, so a predictable experience can be replicated by anyone you hire. Use "modeling" here, meaning look at other organizational strategies in similar businesses that work
Identify your "People Strategy" for hiring a team, and having them do what you need to establish and grow.
Develop your Marketing, branding, and sales strategy, by understanding your customers’ perceived needs and then constructing and testing a Prototype of product or service that meets those needs.
Put in place your Systems Strategy, including your hard systems, soft systems and information systems to deliver your customer promise.

So some things from me.

you want to figure out how to do these things on a timeline.

How to start.
When to transition from "job" to your business full time.
How to scale.

Any successful business involves scaling.

There are 3 ways to scale.

Scale with labor and equipment
Scale money.
Scale time.

Examples:

A construction company that hires more people and invests in more equipment can run more jobs. The money they are getting from those jobs pays for the equipment and labor, leaving a margin or profit at the end. This is scaling equipt and labor.

A real estate investor buys property and rents it out. The value of the property goes up and the rental property money is profit, minus operational costs and costs of upkeep on the property. This is a form of scaling money; the money invested (buying a property) yields a return (rental income and market increase on value of property).

Scale Time. If you put 500 hours into creating a product and a website to sell the product, once the product and systems for fullfilment is created, every unit you sell now increases the "dollar per hour" of time you spent on creation. The product sells itself while you can focus your time on something else. This is scaling time.

So as you start a small business, you are going to have to keep those steps and "how to scale" in mind. Something like physical therapy is going to have to scale with time when it comes to marketing and ad creation and figuring out where new clients come from, and with labor/equipment (hiring more people and therapists if you plan to run an office).

Now as you work in corporate, consider this all TRAINING for developing your small business. You don't know how to do a lot of things yet when it comes to small business that you need to learn if you are going to make it successful.

The biggest thing is to recognize what is important to focus on, and to NOT get distracted by all the other things that aren't important.

Hopefully this post will help with that.

We have a lot of entrepreneurs here so interested in hearing other thoughts!

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